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The Sound of a Lightsaber

There’s a great three-minute video interview with Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt up on Mental Floss at the moment, where he describes the creation of that beautiful lightsaber hum.

Burtt:

I could really just sort of hear the sound. I guess somewhere in my subconscious I had seen a lightsaber before.

We tend to watch the Star Wars trilogy,1 I think, with rose-tinted glasses. While there are many things to be admired in them, they’re also flawed in a lot of ways. Sound design isn’t one of them. Think of how many iconic sounds come from those films: lightsabers, laser blasts, Vader’s breathing, Chewbacca’s roar, R2D2’s chirps and whistles, the engines of the Millennium Falcon. The list goes on.

I’ve written before about my admiration of good sound design. In the case of Star Wars, it was fundamental to the creation of the universe.